ISSN 1082-9873

The Web is a tool in search of a metaphor. The Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) Project
offers a promising view of the Net as a resource for lifelong
learning and knowledge integration. Everyone from computer scientists
to the proverbial "person on the street" senses great
possibility in the large scale conversion of information to digital
formats accessible over networks. Education is often held up as
a prime beneficiary of digital libraries. However, the obvious
benefits, such as distance education or literally global text
search, fall short of justifying either the lofty expectations
for an educational revolution or the enormous costs of putting
everything on-line. Like most technological innovations, we must
focus not only on how tools help us with the same old tasks, but
how the nature of the task itself may be changed. Indeed, truly
revolutionary technology sometimes changes the nature of the user
as well. This is precisely the goal of education, to change the
"user" -- to broaden the mind of a student.

In this paper, we describe how the KIE project takes advantage
of digital libraries when on-line information and resources are
carefully wedded to learning activities. We believe it is this
brokerage of content and activity, informed by cognitive research,
that provides significant insights into learning using digital
libraries. Additionally, due to the heightened variability in
the quality and credibility of on-line information, an electronic
textbook metaphor will not suffice for on-line education. Students
should be engaged in activities which help them discriminate between
competing information resources. In addition to becoming critics
of information, students also need to learn how to become effective
authors in the digital arena.

In the past, technologists have focused on improving and expanding
information delivery, access, and retrieval. The KIE research
group has spent the last two years designing ways for students
to use the Web for science learning. Building on
the results of over eleven years of education
research
in using technology to help students actively learn, our group
works primarily on understanding student cognition and how learning
may be scaffolded using technology. We have encountered many of
the same issues that confront digital library developers, but
our education- and psychology-oriented perspective has given us
insights that have fundamentally changed the way we design our
technology.

Our group has developed the
Scaffolded
Knowledge Integration framework
to guide our design of instructional technology (Linn, 1995).
The SKI framework emphasizes: (a) cognitive goals for instruction
where "less is more" and where students are encouraged
to connect their scientific ideas to their own life experiences,
(b) autonomy on the part of students as they conduct their investigations
and critiques, (c) scientific thinking made visible to students
through computer representations and classroom practices, and
(d) social supports during instruction so that students benefit
from being actively involved in the classroom setting.

The KIE Project

Our research project is charged to improve precollege science
education through effective uses of the World-Wide-Web and the
Internet (Bell, Davis, & Linn, 1995).
Our approach is based on critique, interpretation, and application
of scientific evidence to real world questions and problems. Students
use the KIE environment to do projects, making use of Web-based
"evidence," some scientific and some not. Often the
product of collaboration between practicing scientists and teachers,
these projects help students explore an area of science in a way
that is relevant to their own lives. For example, students may
be asked to critique an argument someone is making about how to
keep cool in the summertime, or they may be learning about particulate
air pollution and collecting relevant data in their own community.

The KIE Learning Environment

Our software both organizes student work and provides structure
to help students learn. Figure 1 shows what a student would see
as they work on a KIE project. The tool palette to the right is
always available. It provides a visible reminder of the steps
making up the project and allows access to the software used in
KIE. This includes commercial applications including a Web browser
and a Web-capable editor. Students use custom KIE software to
organize their project files, analyze evidence, and publish on
the Web. Additionally, the system can provide context-sensitive
guidance on demand. The guidance provided is specific to each
student's own progress in the project. For each piece of evidence
on the Web that students investigate, they can receive guidance
developed especially for helping them understand its salient aspects.

Figure 1 - The Knowledge Integration Environment

We provide two library-like Web-based resources for the students
to use in the course of their projects. The first is the Networked
Evidence Database (NED), a pedagogically-cataloged index into
science information on the Web. The second is the SpeakEasy discussion
software, a structured multimedia discussion tool. Each of these
resources challenges the notion of Web as a static repository.

The Networked Evidence Database

We started with a naive view of the NED, in which we would simply
store a database of scientific evidence which had been put on
the Web. Rapidly we discovered problems familiar to librarians.
How should we catalog the information? Should we use a taxonomy,
keywords, or other types of indices? Further questions arose relating
to science: What should count as "evidence?" Should
we treat ourselves as editors -- judging quality, reliability,
or relevance of information? How can we provide support for the
broad variety of students expected to work with this evidence?
Lastly, we grappled with questions about curriculum and evidence.
We have attempted to create courseware in decomposable, reusable
pieces, and this is a continuing area of emphasis. Serious technical
issues depend on these issues. For example, should all hints and
guidance for a piece of evidence be dependent on the project in
which it is used?

Figure 2 - KIE Networked Evidence and On-Line Guidance

In the end, NED evolved to be a compromise between a catalog and
a collection, and its elements are a compromise between pieces
which stand alone and pieces tailored to a particular project
(see Figure 2). Our current NED collection includes evidence from
physics, paleontology, astronomy, Earth science, and biology.
The following is a piece of evidence from a project where students
are applying their knowledge of thermodynamics to design a house
for a desert setting:

In considering the presentation of information to a students,
a teacher must not only consider the value of the information,
but also its suitability to the individual and the activity they
are to complete. Accordingly, NED is structured to allow teachers
access to this type of information. Each entry includes information
about what projects the evidence has been used with in the past,
the rationale for presenting it to students, in addition to more
traditional information such as suitable age levels, length, content
areas, author, title, format, etc. Indeed, some companies are
beginning to index textbooks and curricular materials in this
way, with pointers to state education frameworks and potential
uses.

Classroom research continues to inform the structure of the evidence
database such that it meets our pedagogical goals. Briefly, our
NED research efforts have focused on the following areas:

Advance Organizers. As part of KIE, students often
work with very complex evidence from Web sites. One approach in
supporting students as they interpret and apply this information
has been to include information about the content, structure,
or source of the information in the NED description for that piece
of evidence. Our research shows that students who received the
advanced organization were more critical of the evidence and were
more successful in interpreting and applying the evidence to the
project at hand.

Guidance. As students work with the NED evidence, they
can request guidance on that specific Web resource. In keeping
with our focus on the interplay of content and activity, our classroom
research indicates that specific guidance tailored to how the
evidence fits within the context of the project is generally the
most successful. However, a focus on the methods and source of
the evidence can also be beneficial to students. [MORE INFO]

The Influence of Media. Web evidence often makes use
of multimedia representations of content. We studied some of the
instructional effects of media by presenting different students
with text and multimedia isomorphs of the same scientific evidence.
Most of the text-multimedia pairs were interpreted significantly
differently, pointing to a strong influence of media representations
in general. Multimedia representations did not lead students
to cite more "correct" scientific ideas, although it
did encourage them to cite more ideas in general, which can be
helpful in encouraging a group of students to brainstorm and consider
alternative explanations for phenomena. [MORE INFO]

The Role of Authority. Not all scientific evidence
on the Web is created equal. Unlike a refereed journal or edited
textbook, information on the Web can come from virtually anyone.
Thus, when students search out relevant evidence for their project,
they should be encouraged to consider the source from which the
evidence derives, but this is an educational challenge. We have
carried out research where evidence was presented to students
under the guise of two different authors -- one a University professor
and another an avid hobbyist. We found that although students
can identify the relevant characteristics of these two different
sources before and after a project, it does not influence how
they interpret the information from the sources during the project.

This research on how students make use of on-line information
has informed the design of the KIE projects. We are also designing
software tools which complement on-line resources like NED based
on this research. The SenseMaker software supports students as
they browse, annotate, and construct arguments for a set of evidence
items relating to a particular KIE project. Figure 3 shows
a sample student
argument
from a debate project on the nature of light. SenseMaker provides
a means for students to express and refine their scientific ideas
about disparate information on the Web.

Figure 3 - SenseMaker

In KIE, students often use a public forum to exchange these personal
perspectives and to further explore a range of theoretical possibilities.
One approach we've been exploring is to have students engage in
discussion on-line using our SpeakEasy discussion tool.

Discussion on the Web: The SpeakEasy

Passive information transfer is of little value if students just
memorize the instructional materials. Constructivist educational
theory describes the importance of students as active learners.
One of the primary ways this is accomplished is through collaborative
learning and community knowledge-building, where students can
share and refine their ideas with others. The SpeakEasy discussion
tool is a component of KIE that allows students, teachers, and
scientists to talk with each other over the Web (Hoadley, Hsi, &
Berman, 1995).
The tool scaffolds students to help them generate a more productive
discussion.

As Don Norman and others have documented, the design of interfaces
influences their use. This is nowhere more important than when
designing tools to engage students in learning through discussion,
since group discussions or collaborative learning can sometimes
engage students and foster reflective learning, but can sometimes
stifle or even traumatize students. The SpeakEasy uses written
text and the categorization of comments to encourage students
to reflect on their ideas as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 - The SpeakEasy

Importantly, the SpeakEasy structures information not only topically,
but socially. All comments are represented by icons of their author's
face. Individuals are encouraged to input overviews of their own
opinions on a topic, which others may browse to get a sense of
the conversation's participants. In another area, individuals
can have a traditional back-and-forth discussion. However, unlike
off-line discussions and many computer-mediated communication
systems, users may respond to any prior messages. The structure
is displayed graphically. Combining categories and the graphical
representation allows students to quickly identify who is talking
with whom, whether they are agreeing or disagreeing, and the general
flow of the conversation.

In addition, the system is semi-synchronous, designed for use
over a wide variety of time scales. On the one hand, students
can use the system synchronously; updates to the conversations
appear whenever the student navigates. On the other hand, the
student conversations evolve into long-term artifacts. A back-end
database allows full-text search on all comments, displaying them
in their original context. The database also allows similarity-based
searches. A student might be presented with comments similar to
theirs when adding a comment, or might search for comments similar
to theirs in another discussion. This allows past discussions
to be used more as a hypertext archive or knowledge base.

This combination of structuring Web pages based on "content"
(through keywords or topics) and "context" (e.g. social
group who produced it, discussion that gave rise to the ideas)
may prove to be one of the most important features digital libraries
could offer. Currently, traditional libraries and social networks
coexist, but are not the same, intersecting primarily through
authors' names. In the future, these information networks and
social networks may be more deeply integrated, allowing us not
only to follow our favorite author, but trace works that have
influenced him or her, institutions that an individual participates
in, and so on.

Conclusions

We believe digital libraries need to be considered from the vantage
point of the content and functionality they are providing as well
as the context of the activities they are intended to support.
As suggested by the activity theory school of psychology, behavior
is not merely a product of individuals and tools, but tasks or
settings as well (see Figure 5).

Figure 5 - KIE Learning Context

As complex resources are designed and developed for education
in particular, careful research on how students learn using such
resources should inform the construction of these digital collections.
If such pedagogically-structured resources are made available,
students will learn how to decipher, judge, apply, and learn from
these digital collections. In terms of significant lifelong learning,
such knowledge will serve the students well.

Acknowledgments

The research described in this paper is the result of a collaborative
effort. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the
rest of the KIE Research Group:
Marcia Linn, Steve Adams, Alex Cuthbert, Doug Clark, Elizabeth
A. Davis, Sherry Hsi, Doug Kirkpatrick, Jim Slotta, and Judy Stern.

This material is based upon research supported by the National
Science Foundation under grant No. RED-9453861. Any opinions,
findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the view of the National Science Foundation.